Sunday, August 14, 2005

Words of wisdom

Welcome Address by Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer, MindTreeConsulting to the Class of 2006 on July 2, 2004 at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India on defining success.

I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family offive brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a DistrictEmployment Officer in Koraput, Orissa. It was and remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary schoolnearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go toschool until the age of eight; I was home-schooled. My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back ofa jeep- so the family moved from place to place and, without any trouble, myMother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was amatriculate when she married my Father. My parents set the foundationof my life and the value system which makes me what I am today andlargely defines what success means to me today.

As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by thegovernment. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parkedin our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government- he reiterated to us that it was not 'his jeep' but the government'sjeep. Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, hewould walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that wenever sat in the government jeep - we could sit in it only when it wasstationary. That was our early childhood lesson in governance - alesson that corporate managers learn the hard way, some never do.

The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other memberof my Father's office. As small children, we were taught not to callhim by his name. We had to use the suffix 'dada' whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and adriver by the name of Raju was appointed - I repeated the lesson to mytwo small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju,'Raju Uncle' - very different from many of their friends who refer totheir family drivers as 'my driver'. When I hear that term from aschool- or college-going person, I cringe. To me, the lesson wassignificant - you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinatesthan your superiors.

Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother'schulha - an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was no gas, nor electricalstoves. The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served,Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman's 'muffosil' edition- delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we werereading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world waslarger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine.After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly.Father taught us a simple lesson. He used to say, "You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it".

That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business beginsand ends with that simple precept.

Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios - we did not have one. We saw otherpeople having radios in their homes and each time there was anadvertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Fatherwhen we could get one. Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios - alluding to his fivesons. We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally askFather as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. Hewould give a similar reply, "We do not need a house of our own. Ialready own five houses". His replies did not gladden our hearts inthat instant. Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not tomeasure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.

Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigsand built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. Shewould take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. Thewhite ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha andmixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At that time, my father's transfer order came. Afew neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain tobeautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would onlybenefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter toher that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, "I haveto create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited". That was myfirst lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself,it is what you leave behind that defines success.

My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job atthe University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil servicesexamination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in mylife, I saw electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It wasaround 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did notknow the Oriya script. So, in addition to my daily chores, my job wasto read her the local newspaper - end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest inmany different things. While reading out news about the war, I feltthat I was fighting the war myself. She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe. In it, we became part of alarger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that senseof larger connectedness.

Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term "Jai Jawan,Jai Kishan" and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other thanreading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day Iwould land up near the University's water tank, which served thecommunity. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could bespies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. Iwould daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would befeatured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the spies at warignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination. Imaginationis everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we cancreate that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.

Over the next few years, my mother's eyesight dimmed but in me shecreated a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see theworld and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated forcataract. I remember, when she returned after her operation and she sawmy face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, "Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair". I remain mighty pleased withthat adulation even till date. Within weeks of getting her sight back,she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes.

That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living withblindness, she never complained about her fate even once. Curious toknow what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, "No, I do not see darkness. I only see lighteven with my eyes closed". Until she was eighty years of age, she didher morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes. To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is aboutnot seeing the world but seeing the light.

Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined theindustry and began to carve my life's own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Traineewith the DCM group and eventually found my life's calling with the ITindustry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Lifetook me places - I worked with outstanding people, challengingassignments and traveled all over the world. In 1992, while I wasposted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life withmy eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend tohim - he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neckto toe. The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward areboth victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst. Onemorning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottlewas empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked theattending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. Inthat horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration andanger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, "Why have you not gone home yet?" Here was a man onhis deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his ownstate. I was stunned at his stoic self. There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what isthe limit of inclusion you can create. My father died the next day.

He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, hisfrugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion. Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort,whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise yourconsciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not aboutbuilding material comforts - the transistor that he never could buy orthe house that he never owned. His success was about the legacy he left,the mimetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of a ill-paid, unrecognized government servant's world.

My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerelydoubted the capability of the post-independence Indian politicalparties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bosequit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then aschoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined anunderground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords.Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook ofthe two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the OldLady had differing opinions. In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity inthinking. Success is not about the ability to create a definitivedogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, ofdialogue and continuum.

Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic strokeand was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down fromthe US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state.She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to returnto work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, "Why are you kissing me, go kissthe world." Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence oflife and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to ananonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees ThreeHundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity - wastelling me to go and kiss the world!

Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above theimmediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity tosmall people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is aboutgiving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creatingextra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.

Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and Godspeed. Go, kiss the world.